Newport News Gives Truman a Second Life

Happy Thursday.

The build this week: USS Harry S. Truman has arrived at HII's Newport News Shipbuilding for the carrier overhaul that will carry it through the second half of its service life.

Underneath: site selection for the first new military base in 40 years is up for grabs, $22.3 billion Texas energy campus, a $3 billion Brownsville shipyard, a $300 million electric-truck order and $251 million for orbital manufacturing.

The Lead

The big picture: Newport News Shipbuilding is the center of America's carrier industrial base. Its refueling and complex overhauls take a ship built for fifty years of service and prepare it for the decades still ahead.

Driving the news: USS Harry S. Truman arrived at the Hampton Roads yard on Wednesday to begin that work. HII's base Navy award is worth $5.10 billion and reaches $5.18 billion with options.

Why it matters: An RCOH represents about one-third of a carrier's lifetime maintenance. The program reaches thousands of compartments and tanks, refuels the nuclear plant, renews hull and propulsion systems and installs modern combat capability through one integrated shipyard effort.

What's next: Newport News' planners, shipbuilders, sailors and suppliers now turn years of preparation into the detailed work that will return Truman to the fleet for its next chapter.

Read HII's official arrival announcement.

See HII's $5.1 billion contract announcement.

Defense & Space

• The Department of War launched a nationwide competition to host the Next Great American Base, a hardened joint installation that Hegseth says will house up to 25,000 service members. His memo gives planners 14 days to deliver a site-selection framework and calls on every governor and adjutant general to bring their "best sales pitch."

• PCB Technologies announced a $38 million engagement with a leading U.S. aerospace and defense manufacturer for advanced electronics production.

• Li-S Energy powered a near-two-hour Pegasus drone flight with its lithium-sulfur battery system.

• M-Fly raised new capital to scale production of laser-guidance modules and stabilized gimbals.

• UNSEENLABS booked BRO-23 and BRO-32 on one launch, pairing two generations of maritime-surveillance satellites.

• Viridian Space received a $225,000 NASA STTR award for early-stage space technology work.

Maritime & Shipbuilding

• Saronic broke ground on its $3 billion Port Alpha shipyard in Brownsville, Texas, adding an 835-acre production campus to the wider American maritime network anchored by Hampton Roads.

• The U.S. Navy selected three Louisiana shipyards to build 30 unmanned surface vessels under a $1.2 billion program, expanding the national production network around its established shipbuilding hubs.

• The Navy also established its Robotic and Autonomous Systems Warfighting Development Center at Little Creek-Fort Story in Virginia Beach last week. The new command will write the tactics, techniques and procedures for the Navy's unmanned systems across the air, surface and undersea domains, under Rear Adm. Melvin Smith. It adds another center of gravity to the Hampton Roads region that already anchors the nation’s maritime industrial base.

• Grupo Amper won a €9.2 million Navantia award covering 237,000 work hours for a Spanish Navy replenishment ship's aft superstructure.

Semiconductors & Electronics

• Synopsys and Amazon signed a multiyear IP agreement for custom silicon spanning chip design, cloud and AI-powered engineering.

• OpenAI and Synopsys introduced GPT-Synopsys to bring frontier models into semiconductor engineering workflows.

• Knowles expanded its RF signal-chain line with A-Series attenuators for high-frequency electronics.

• Transmart advanced 12-to-14-micrometer soft-magnetic ribbon for power electronics and AI data-center equipment.

Manufacturing & Automation

• Sherwin-Williams opened its expanded Statesville, North Carolina, plant with 50,000 square feet of improvements, more automation and four new rail spurs.

• Onshore Technologies opened a fully operating manufacturing site in Salem, New Hampshire for wire harnesses, cable assemblies and electromechanical systems.

• Harbinger received a FedEx order for 2,000 electric trucks worth more than $300 million, giving the American manufacturer a major commercial production program.

• Flow Engineering raised a $50 million Series B at a $750 million valuation to speed hardware development for customers including Rivian, Anduril, Joby and Stoke.

• Destro AI raised $8 million to coordinate mixed robot fleets in enterprise warehouses.

Energy & Materials

• Related, NextEra Energy and Lewis Energy Group announced the $22.3 billion Project Star campus in Encinal, Texas, pairing 6.47 gigawatts of generation with a planned 5-gigawatt digital-infrastructure site.

• LG Energy Solution and indiGOtech signed a nonbinding MOU for 46-series batteries for U.S. commercial electric vans.

• Nanoramic launched a standard Neocarbonix slurry-precursor catalog for battery manufacturers.

• Norge Mining secured a conditional share-subscription facility of up to $125 million for its critical-minerals processing plan.

Supply Chain & Freight

• Ethiopian Airlines ordered eight Boeing 777-8 Freighters and two 777 Freighters to add payload and range to its cargo network.

• Quantum Space signed All Points Logistics for Ranger Prime launch processing ahead of the spacecraft's mission.

• Geekplus and LPP Logistics expanded their warehouse-robotics partnership into a repeatable fulfillment model.

Dealbook

• Varda Space Industries raised a $251 million Series D to scale space-based pharmaceutical processing.

• Flow Engineering raised $50 million for its hardware-development platform.

• Miter raised a $40 million Series B for construction operations, bringing total funding to $78 million.

• Relay raised $36 million for frontline safety and operating intelligence.

• ArkeaBio raised $15 million for its livestock methane-reduction vaccine.

• Zenithon raised $10 million for world models used in fusion, rockets and semiconductor manufacturing.

• Destro AI raised $8 million for robot-fleet orchestration.

• M-Fly closed a new production-scaling round for laser guidance and stabilized gimbals.

• Norge Mining arranged up to $125 million through a facility conditional on a public listing.

Back Tuesday.